Before a hooting and hollering CPAC crowd, fading GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio defended a Republican presidential campaign that was derailed this past week by a series of dick jokes and blamed rival Donald Trump for starting it.

In an interview posted to YouTube by the Rubio campaign, CNN’s Dana Bash expressed her discomfort with the tenor of the campaign by speaking as the mother of a 4 year old.

“I want to put my mom hat on for a second. Because you’re the proud father of four and I’m the mother of a 4-year-old son, and I’m having trouble letting him watch the news because things have gotten so vulgar,” she told Rubio as the crowd began booing.

“It’s so over the top that I don’t want him to think that it’s okay to act like that,” she continued. “How do you feel as a father and a presidential candidate about how low things have gone?”

Rubio neatly sidestepped the current situation between GOP candidates by making a veiled reference to former President Bill Clinton, saying, “I don’t want to have a president that we have to be constantly explaining to our kids, ‘look, I know that’s what the president did, but you shouldn’t do that.'”

“We actually had a president like that no long ago,” he added before smirking.

Speaking with Bash, Rubio complained, “Donald Trump, he might have grown up the way he did with a lot of money and going to boarding schools. I can tell you this, where I grew up, when someone keeps punching people in the face, eventually someone is going to have to stand up and punch them back.”

About the Author

Tom Boggioni is based in the quaint seaside community of Pacific Beach in less quaint San Diego. He writes about politics, media, culture, and other annoyances. Mostly he spends his days at the beach gazing at the horizon waiting for the end of the world, or the sun to go down. Whichever comes first.